I can tell you for a fact that when I was working in Climate Science in the mid 2000s, Scientists where being heavily pressured to "tone it down" in terms of model tuning to avoid attracting the saurons-eye of conservative political lobbyists who, at the time, where busy going after the fucking weatherman with some outrageously mentally ill theory that weather stations where spookily lying about how hot it was, as if we hadn't been factoring in urban heat islands already since the frigging 1800s.

True, you aren't going to be running this at home. But then no one runs the SOTA models at home. You can GLM-5.2 on z.ai's hardware, using a subscription plan similar to the plans offered by Anthropic and OpenAI. The most notable difference is: it's 1/2 the price.

The problem with providers like z.ai is running into compliance problems and corporate paranoia. As an Australian company, the boss is paranoid enough about even letting the Americans access our cloud data let alone the Chinese who have always been shady commercially. Though to much groaning from the tech staff he's also recently discovered vibe coding so. who the f*** knows anymore.

Ah , ignore my other comment. That was attached to the wrong post :/

Yeah I've read Kuhn. Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method" is an interesting take too (he strongly leans on the chaotic nature of how real science is often done). Like yeah, I'm more just recounting the Poperian "party line" on science. However while certainly its always a lot more compicated and rooted in the cultural institutions of science and the dominant discourses on how-to-do-a-science I'd argue that when science is working *well* it is essentially a popperian enterprise, and can somewhat go off the rails when its not (see the competing madness going on at the bleeding edge of physics where thousands of physicists have put lifetimes into String theory despite the fact we have no idea if any of its even remotely true [and in fact we are starting to get some evidence its not, due to the failure of SuSy, which needs to be true for String to be true). I dont think thats a good state to be in, and a number of physicists are starting to arc up and say "Hey, this is madness. Lets go back to fundamentals, experiments, data, things we can actually reason about with proper scientific method"

I accidently attached this to the wrong comment before. Whoops. Reposting it in the right place to make it make sense.
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Copenhagen, and a few things like that I'd argue are exceptions not the rule, because we honestly dont fucking know and we might not even be able to find out until we can figure out how to test for it.

The truth of the matter is the QM Interpretations aren't really science, but rather science-adjacent in the best sense of the term (maths is science-adjacent, and very much part of the conversation). Until we can find a way a way to run experiments to start ruling out interpretations or even better stiill actually confirm one, all we really have is a statement of a problem "What is the physical form of this rather central piece of math" and we have some good, but 100% speculatory, suggestions.

QM is not alone on this. String theory is very much science-adjacent because we just dont have experiments that could disprove or prove it.

As a result, yeah, debates are all we have. And boy do those debates suck.

Copenhagen, and a few things like that I'd argue are exceptions not the rule, because we honestly dont fucking know and we might not even be able to find out until we can figure out how to test for it.

The truth of the matter is the QM Interpretations aren't really science, but rather science-adjacent in the best sense of the term (maths is science-adjacent, and very much part of the conversation). Until we can find a way a way to run experiments to start ruling out interpretations or even better stiill actually confirm one, all we really have is a statement of a problem "What is the physical form of this rather central piece of math" and we have some good, but 100% speculatory, suggestions.

QM is not alone on this. String theory is very much science-adjacent because we just dont have experiments that could disprove or prove it.

As a result, yeah, debates are all we have. And boy do those debates suck.

Science does not have truths. It has theories, and all of them are incorrect at some level. Some of them are useful and supported by data. See, for example f=ma and a falling apple. If it is truth yea seek, turn to math.

No. Some truths are straight up true. The wrinkle is that we can't truly know for sure. But we can build up a consensus built from experiments and robust exchanges of data.

Possibly, though their names, citizenship status, etc. would be helpful to know that.

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."

There's no way to interpret these costs, that nobody is ever going to be willing to pay, as a reminder that soon these companies are going to be bankrupt.

Every time I see an AI story like this, it makes me realize I really have no idea what the AI bubble hardware is actually like, and how it might be used after auction.

A few months from now you might find yourself at an auction where 4TB of faster-than-anything-you-have RAM might be for sale for $80, but of course it won't be in the usual DIMMs that any of your existing mobos can use, will it? What will it be, and how do we best exploit it?

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

I think we've identified the harmful bit right there.

Er, actually it sounds like values from other, non-US cultures operating in parts of a worldwide company.

.... don't impose your western values on the eastern folk of this worldwide company!

Central banks do a lot of useful things, but they don't give currency a value (they can, however manipulate the value others give it by printing it, destroying it, changing interest rates, changing the amount of reserve banks need and the multiple they can lend, etc). What gives a currency value is supply and demand- the fact other people want that currency. Which is also what sets international exchange rates.

There's also the fact you need it to pay taxes, which sets a base amount of demand. But beyond that it's all supply and demand when deciding how much value it has against other currencies or physical objects.

WHich is different from crypto how? You print it from doing large amounts of useless work on a computer that provides no value and is immediately thrown out. Or the new proof of stake algorithms, in which you print it by having previously printed it. I'll take cash, thanks.